Sound Transit – another kind of sound database

A few months ago I already posted links to some sound databases on the internet. This time I want to present you another place which has – apart from the recordings -  a very nice feature to explore them. But one after the other.

soundtransit.nl

Rather than just sounds of opening doors or dogs making love, soundtransit.nl collects field recordings from around the world “with an emphasis on the unintentional sounds which often go unnoticed in our daily lives”. The user is invited to upload their files and one can search and download everything under a Creative Commons-license.

What makes this site special in my opinion is the part where you can book sound transits: Since the recordings are filed with the place where they were taken you can enter two locations and a number of stops in between. As a result a mix of  corresponding sounds is generated and can be heard or downloaded. One example I like very much is a journey from Berlin (Germany) to Palma de Mallorca (Spain), via Egypt, India and Albania.

compiling sooperlooper

I recently downloaded the newest sources of sooperlooper (1.6.13). Ubuntu 8.04 comes with a version from 2005 (1.0.8), which actually surprised me a bit. Compiling the sources is not a big deal, but ubuntu users will not find one of the packages from the build requirements in the standard repositories: Rubberband.

To compile rubberband you will need another package, fftw-3. This, in turn, requires vamp-sdk. Downloading and compiling from bottom to top you should be able to compile sooperlooper, all other packages (and their package-dev counterparts!) are found in the repositories.

sooperlooper segmentation fault

I wrote before, that I couldn’t get sooperlooper started. It turned out to be a problem which has nothing to do with sooperlooper. Because the sooperlooper server runs up fine but the GUI cannot connect to it. Filling in the right data for host name etc. and reconnecting, the GUI quits with a segmentatioin fault.

I found out that my hosts were not resolved correctly, apparently after changing my hostname the wrong way. So I changed the second line of file /etc/hosts so that it reads:
127.0.1.1 myCorrectHostname
It was wrong before and after that sooperlooper works fine!

By the way: I could have known much earlier, since the GUI gives a message which ends in “…Also check that the system’s hostname resolves properly.”. But I only realised it when I was looking for how to get rid of a warning message that I got whenever running sudo anyCommand. It read
sudo: unable to resolve host myCorrectHostname
Both problems had the same cause. Solved!

eeepc as a linux audio workstation

A few days ago I told you about the first steps into using an eeepc as a real-time audio tool. jack runs up fine. I chose the internal audio card with the combination 48kHz,  256frames, 4buffers (which gives a latency of  21.3msec) and running on its  own  it doesn’t cough up any xrun.

I couldn’t get sooperlooper working yet. Sooperlooper works (see solution)! freqtweak works  (A nice little thing!), too.  Ardour works very nice, too. Sometimes the screen is a bit small for the whole window, but  I was using ardour a bit today and it wasn’t too much of  a hassle. Audacity is buggy (converting to mono + playing results in a segmentation fault).

I will try and find out about sooperlooper and audacity. Other programs and how an external audio card  connects  (I hope  my older posts will tell me what to do), a midi interface and all that will come up soon…

a real-time kernel on a netbook

As I hoped it would be I can now give you some good news about using a real-time kernel on an ATOM platform. Basically: it works!

I bought an eeepc 1000h, one of those small laptops, which has an N270 chip from intel, 1GB of memory and a 160GB hard disc. I thought, this cannot have much less performance than my old laptop (see the About-page). I have an ubuntu 8.04 installed and usually run the linux-eeepc kernel.

To have good audio performance, I installed the real-time kernel from the 8.04  repositories and did what I wrote in the first post. Then I started the jack daemon with “/usr/bin/jackd -R -dalsa -dhw:0 -r48000 -p1024 -n2” and it worked quite well. I expected a lot of problems, but no. For some cutting, single track recording or trying bits and pieces it should be okay. I’ll give it a go and will try it out more. With an external audio card it could even be better…

So this is not bad. What the standard real-time installation still misses is a working  network. The camera and special keys do not do anything either. But I think, for the moment, this does not really matter.

sound databases

Well, before going on to the promised topics I’ll tell you something else. When you are looking for samples, sound bites, weird noises or any other piece of sonic experience you might go out and record at your will. But you might not have recording equipment or there is no chance for you to find a suitable source. Then you will probably search the internet for help. There are a few resources where one can find samples for free but to me the most intriguing is freesound.org.

the freesound project
At freesound.org one finds a growing number of Creative Commons-licensed samples. Anybody can listen to them, downloading is only possible after registration. This, however, is free of charge and easily done in an instant. You need a valid e-mail adress to do so.
The sounds are documented by the uploading user and furthermore tagged with single words. The site has a section with geo-tagged sounds to find the sound of a Waikiki thunderbolt or of a Greenland river.

not-so-free sound projects
Apart from above database, there are many more resources, but it is not always clear if the material is free to use or not. So it will be up to you to find it out. There is a sound search engine which will find a lot of links to sounds throughout the internet but you cannot be sure about the license. One would have to ask the provider of the samples concerned.

probably-copyrighted sound project
A different kind of resource is the wav planet where you find lots of quotes from movies and TV shows. This service is probably not legal in many countries of the world, so check with your lawyer or with your government.

things to come

Since the last post it has been a while, but the blog is not dead! That concert drained a lot of energy, therefore the publishing had to wait. Back on track, at the moment I am working on new posts. If working out as planned, there will be

• a follow-up to the “Introduction to Sooperlooper”,
• some insights into sound generation with python
• and hopefully good news about using ATOM powered platforms for making live music.

I know that most people think, only the fastest and the best computer is good for music generation. But music has been made on computers for many years by now. Actually, this ATOM cpu seems to be close to the performance of the 1.4GHz Centrino, with which I have made some very good experiences. So, what is more important in the end is the creativity of the musician rather then the capacity of the equipment.

I haven’t been able to find a working real-time kernel for an ATOM cpu and my efforts on compiling my own haven’t been very fruitful. But I’ll keep looking for it. Maybe one should launch something like a netbookRT.sourceforge project? Any comments/ideas?

a live looping concert with open source software only

So this is a comment on the first concert I did together with a friend, using live looping software (sooperlooper) and an effect program (creox) to connect a microphone. Well, to a cheap stereo audio interface (m-audio transit) which got its input from a little DJ mixer (as a preamp with band filters) which had the mic plugged in. The output of everything (the live voice and the loops) left through one stereo output into the master mixer. My friend entered into it with an electric bass guitar (with echo). A forty five minute “gig” without any major problems. I’ll tell you how I connected it, the problems I ran into and some tips and tricks.

Introduction to Sooperlooper

Sooperlooper is a live looping sampler. It’s a great program! The main idea is to record and loop different audio samples in parallel. Already saved audio files can be loaded and looped as well. Many different features for recording or synchronizing make it a toy for long hours of playing around with. It interfaces with the jack audio connection kit, comes with ubuntu linux and, obviously, is free to download, copy and alter (GPL V2.0). Compiling the source is not as easy on ubuntu platforms (due to some package problems), I might post on that later.

Running slgui (the user interface comes separated from the actual looping server) a window opens with one (empty) stereo loop device and the jack master output (which is the input plus all active loops) is opened.

sooperlooper main window

The main functions to start with are the record button, trigger, overdub and mute.  When recording is started the input is piped to that loop and recorded. Pressing record again the loop is played back (and looped) from the beginning.  Overdub starts recording over what is played back, mixing both together with a ratio defined by the “feedback” bar. When muted “trig” starts looping the sample, whereas “once” stops playback (of that loop) after the first round.These few functions give already a lot of fun. Using “undo” and “redo” to the left one can play happily with the first loop.

All this is nicely done when using a MIDI keyboard. In the preferences  one can make sooperlooper to “learn” MIDI events for different commands. With vkeybd (post) I arranged the main functions on the keys from 1-5 for the first loop and the rows below for others.  A detailed description of all functions is found on the website.

More loops can be opened and synchronized, more on that in a later post.

live audio effects – creox

For real time audio effects I found creox (website) to be a stable solution. It consists of 5 different effects (Phaser, Flanger, Echo, Tremolo, Distortion) which can be dis- and enabled in different orders of connection. Presets can be saved, although not changed (as of version 0.2.2rc2). Instead one has to save a changed set under a new name. Unfortunately it doesn’t have MIDI control so one has to click or change focus – strike key, which is a bit awkward in live situations. But the presets window can be detached from the main window.

When creox is set into play mode (SPACE key) it opens up one stereo jack input and one output port. Via the jack control it can be connected to any other jack port.

Concerning stability: starting up is the critical phase to my experiences. After setting creox into play mode it sometimes dies. But if it survives, then it is usually stable. I tried jackrack (website) as well, which is a more professional effect station for LADSPA effects, but it seems to be less stable. Since jackrack includes MIDI control it should be worth fiddling around with it. Maybe compiling it on my system helps or my hardware (about) is just to weak…??? Any comments/experiences appreciated.